A nice day in Belmont is infinitely nicer than a nice day in Medford. Here it is so lush and green, and there, a sunny, beautiful day only makes the pavement bright and hot. What a difference five miles make! Soon I will go back outside to enjoy the day (and later, a trip to Middlesex Fells), but goodness, I have neglected my blog! Here's a brief update, and later I will jump into the conversation re: the utility of complex language.
One of my most interesting experiences in the last couple of weeks was a meeting with a financial advisor for a free consultation. There was something unexpectedly refreshing about being able to speak frankly with someone about my finances, and it occurred to me, as I sat across a table covered with documents detailing every aspect of my financial life, that there wasn't really anyone who had a picture of my financial health as clear as this advisor did in that moment. I think probably the only people I've talked with openly about money are my parents and my friend BQ, with whom I went through my taxes last year; I suppose they would be happy to look at the specifics of my finances if I asked them to, but the most part we speak in generalities. It's interesting that there's such a taboo in speaking about money, and how personal the specifics of earnings and spending habits are when (1) to some extent, you can gauge someone's financial situation from their external behaviors and (2) financial health is something incredibly important and many people are undereducated about how to make good financial decisions -- for this I need only cite the American epidemic of spending more than you earn.
Despite the value of the meeting, I've decided for the moment that I'm not going to work with a financial advisor, which is somewhat expensive (the annual retainer fee is 1% of your income). The meeting did bring up for me the idea that I really should start educating myself about personal finance strategies, and perhaps ultimately I will decide that I'm unwilling to put the work in myself to making educated money decisions. One percent of your income. Hmmm. The natural question, which I did ask the advisor, is,
(1) How likely is it that I'm going to recoup that directly as a result of the advice of the consultant? Basically, how can you assure me that starting out in the hole is a good financial idea when with my own discipline and research I could probably do better than I'm doing?
The advisor's answer: well, it depends on your willingness to follow recommendations, which requires some amount of work and discipline. Ron Lieber, New York Times finance columnist, was a bit better at selling the idea of paying for a financial advice:
"Most of us would rather avoid paying for help. Many financial planners charge 1 percent of a client’s assets annually for advice on anything and everything, including investing. So if you have $200,000 saved for retirement, that is $2,000 a year.
"The best defense I have ever heard for this level of compensation comes from Roger Streit, a financial planner at Key Financial Solutions in Roseland, N.J. He says that only 1 percent of us are wise enough and regimented enough to manage our own financial affairs. The other 99 percent, meanwhile, could almost certainly improve their investment performance at least 1 percent, thus justifying the annual fee.
"Sure, this sounds self-serving. But it is also probably true. For people without large portfolios or those who need help with something specific, planners affiliated with the Garrett Planning Network can help. All members are financial planners who agree to offer hourly rates."
Another, related question, is whether working with a financial advisor could be considered an educational experience that you can graduate from. So, question #2:
(2) Do people typically learn skills when working with a financial advisor that ultimately obviate the need for an advisor?
To this, the advisor said that a person's financial situation generally becomes more complicated over time (e.g., you buy property/get a mortgage, get married, have kids, inherit money, get divorced, have more savings to invest, want to save for college education, etc.). The advisor also said that she worked with her own financial advisor because she valued having a second set of eyes for everything, and a chance to relax a little bit on the research (I have to say that this point wasn't necessarily one that made her sound like a compelling investment for me).
So for now? I've come with a bit of a reading list on personal finance, and begun a virtual stock portfolio on www.updown.com. :)
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Sound Bites
Today I went to Sound Bites, the Ball Square breakfast restaurant that is as renowned for the impatience of its waitstaff as it is for its food. True to form, the server rushed us through our meal with unfortunate haste. First, he approached us very prematurely to ask, "Can I take these plates away for you?" Then, a few minutes after putting the check on the table, he circled back to ask, "Have I given you your check already?" The gesture that finally drove us out was when the waiter yelled across the room, "Maria, can you bring another chair to this table so we can get the party of three seated here?" At this cue, we took our Saturday morning across the street to True Grounds, a venue that is less restricted by the dimension of time.
Sounds Bites does have exceptional food, but also the mistaken impression that the pleasure of a meal is purely gustatory. I would gladly make concessions in the quality of the food for the chance to linger over a meal, undisturbed, and talk. In other words, I recommend the food but not the restaurant. Which means I can't really recommend the food. So if you're in Ball Square, True Grounds is the place to go.
The end.
Sounds Bites does have exceptional food, but also the mistaken impression that the pleasure of a meal is purely gustatory. I would gladly make concessions in the quality of the food for the chance to linger over a meal, undisturbed, and talk. In other words, I recommend the food but not the restaurant. Which means I can't really recommend the food. So if you're in Ball Square, True Grounds is the place to go.
The end.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Bundeskleingartengesetz
One of the delightful things about German is its fondness for sticking several small words together to create one long one. Here we have Bundes-klein-garten-gesetz: federal-small-garden-law, a word that encapsulates my love for the German language and for the German cultural sensibility that longs for private gardens enough to consider them at length in national legislation.
The Bundeskleingartengesetz was a bill regulating the small garden plots that German city-dwellers can rent at the outskirts of virtually any German city. When I lived in Mannheim, I encountered a few pockets of these gardens: they are small plots of land, ranging from the size of a small bedroom to a large livingroom -- which are usually separated usually by mesh fencing. But more than a garden, these spaces are often homes away from home -- and some have compact, elaborate sheds with amenities for spending the night, preparing a meal, or hosting a small garden party. The degree of ownership and attachment people feel for these small pieces of land was moving, and goodness, I wish we had something comparable in Somerville!
Along the bikepath, there is a Somerville community garden project, but it is, in my estimation, a failure by comparison. The gardens are poorly maintained; the owners seem to have little actual ownership over the space -- anyone can gain access to the gardens, while the German gardens are under lock and key, preventing flower and vegetable thieves; and because of their location on along a thoroughfare for walkers and bikers, I can't imagine it would be a pleasant backdrop for weeding and planting.
I'm currently trying to grow a cilantro plant in my bedroom window now -- I started it from seed about a month ago -- and it seems, more than anything, like an exercise in desperation. As a counterpoint to the pleasure of watching a plant successfully grow is the moroseness you feel in watching a fledging plant grow taller without being able to hold itself up; growing a pale, whitish green instead of the robust shade of healthy plants.
Our small backyard, here, is paved in asphalt, and indeed, it is too small to justify a lawn and therefore a lawnmower, but I can't help longing for a little bit of land to play with...
The Bundeskleingartengesetz was a bill regulating the small garden plots that German city-dwellers can rent at the outskirts of virtually any German city. When I lived in Mannheim, I encountered a few pockets of these gardens: they are small plots of land, ranging from the size of a small bedroom to a large livingroom -- which are usually separated usually by mesh fencing. But more than a garden, these spaces are often homes away from home -- and some have compact, elaborate sheds with amenities for spending the night, preparing a meal, or hosting a small garden party. The degree of ownership and attachment people feel for these small pieces of land was moving, and goodness, I wish we had something comparable in Somerville!
Along the bikepath, there is a Somerville community garden project, but it is, in my estimation, a failure by comparison. The gardens are poorly maintained; the owners seem to have little actual ownership over the space -- anyone can gain access to the gardens, while the German gardens are under lock and key, preventing flower and vegetable thieves; and because of their location on along a thoroughfare for walkers and bikers, I can't imagine it would be a pleasant backdrop for weeding and planting.
I'm currently trying to grow a cilantro plant in my bedroom window now -- I started it from seed about a month ago -- and it seems, more than anything, like an exercise in desperation. As a counterpoint to the pleasure of watching a plant successfully grow is the moroseness you feel in watching a fledging plant grow taller without being able to hold itself up; growing a pale, whitish green instead of the robust shade of healthy plants.
Our small backyard, here, is paved in asphalt, and indeed, it is too small to justify a lawn and therefore a lawnmower, but I can't help longing for a little bit of land to play with...
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Cubicle culture
For a while I've wanted to contemplate cubicles on my blog, and what finally prompts me to do so now is an interesting snippet that someone from work shared with me: the current recession has spawned a new generation of interior designers who can remodel an office space to make it less apparent that only 50 people are working in an office that was originally designed to accommodate 100 people. Reworking mazes of cubicles is the chief art of this: when an office space becomes peppered with too many abandoned cubes, the morale of the remaining workers tends to flag and affect productivity. But viola! Step in an artiste who tears down unneeded cubicles and creates a lounge area with bean bags and plants, and heck, maybe even rock sculpture with a waterfall. Even an extravagance like that is minor compared to the cost of payroll plus benefits for the last six people you laid off...
While there is something hopeful about this entrepreneurial ingenuity -- those people really are making lemons into lemonade -- the very existence of such a job is itself dreary. Have you sensed, this week, a new and disconcerting grimness about the economy? Reading the newspaper today made me want to darn my old socks and revert to eating ramen. It never crossed my mind that food prices could become a real concern in the developed world.
The recession-era interior designer concept also struck a chord with me for a different reason. When I worked at HM, there were at least 600 cubes on my floor, and though I hesitate to estimate how many of them were empty during my tenure there, my particular neighborhood had more than its share of empty workspaces. For the better part of a year, the cubicle across from me was unoccupied, and after weeks of vaguely supposing it would be filled any day, I put my raincoat in it to dry; then it began to house my commuter shoes, and soon I realized that the stapler on the desk was nicer than the one on mine. That cube eventually became an extension of my own space, enough so that if someone had occupied it, I would have felt it an infringement upon my territory.
Perhaps because that was my first job, I wasn't as sensitive to fact that the empty row of cubicles next to me signified something ominous. In what was certainly the most difficult course in my graduate program, we spent time considering the meaning of emptiness in philosophy; and how "emptiness" could never *be* empty because it was, in fact, full of meaning. In that class I felt I was always on the cusp of understanding something exciting and life changing but the epiphany was always slightly out of my reach. The students and the professor would talk about these abstractions as if they were the most important things in the world and I felt like it would be the greatest thing in the world to have the kind of mind that could process all of those things that at once wonderful and incomprehensible.
The recession makes me think of the empty cubicles makes me think of my graduate school program makes me think of my intellectual failings. And now, it is time to go to bed. I spent months contemplating sentences like this:
“The universal is an empty place, a void which can be filled only by the particular, but which, through its very emptiness, produces a series of crucial effects in the structuration/destructuration of social relationships.”
At once exciting and incomprehensible. How, precisely, do people study philosophy?
While there is something hopeful about this entrepreneurial ingenuity -- those people really are making lemons into lemonade -- the very existence of such a job is itself dreary. Have you sensed, this week, a new and disconcerting grimness about the economy? Reading the newspaper today made me want to darn my old socks and revert to eating ramen. It never crossed my mind that food prices could become a real concern in the developed world.
The recession-era interior designer concept also struck a chord with me for a different reason. When I worked at HM, there were at least 600 cubes on my floor, and though I hesitate to estimate how many of them were empty during my tenure there, my particular neighborhood had more than its share of empty workspaces. For the better part of a year, the cubicle across from me was unoccupied, and after weeks of vaguely supposing it would be filled any day, I put my raincoat in it to dry; then it began to house my commuter shoes, and soon I realized that the stapler on the desk was nicer than the one on mine. That cube eventually became an extension of my own space, enough so that if someone had occupied it, I would have felt it an infringement upon my territory.
Perhaps because that was my first job, I wasn't as sensitive to fact that the empty row of cubicles next to me signified something ominous. In what was certainly the most difficult course in my graduate program, we spent time considering the meaning of emptiness in philosophy; and how "emptiness" could never *be* empty because it was, in fact, full of meaning. In that class I felt I was always on the cusp of understanding something exciting and life changing but the epiphany was always slightly out of my reach. The students and the professor would talk about these abstractions as if they were the most important things in the world and I felt like it would be the greatest thing in the world to have the kind of mind that could process all of those things that at once wonderful and incomprehensible.
The recession makes me think of the empty cubicles makes me think of my graduate school program makes me think of my intellectual failings. And now, it is time to go to bed. I spent months contemplating sentences like this:
“The universal is an empty place, a void which can be filled only by the particular, but which, through its very emptiness, produces a series of crucial effects in the structuration/destructuration of social relationships.”
At once exciting and incomprehensible. How, precisely, do people study philosophy?
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